The less shared context you have the higher the coordination costs

People should be more open to small discrete questions

§Demystification and Thought Leaders

People coming up with analogies during a conversation is like a lookahead search

# Conversations are better at demystifying than written material 
They enable a feedback loop for figuring out where there is mismatched context. When something is mystifying you often don’t have the words to describe it so any questions you ask would inherently require clarification.

This would suggest that expecting everything to happen via written communication when people are attempting to get into a shared context is problematic. 

### Related
- [[Thoughts should be written, Questions should be verbal]] ::these two should probably be merged::



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arthurNatureTechnologyWhat2009

Modularization requires legible interfaces

Modularization allows different groups to work on different pieces

Modularization enables pieces to be used in many different technologies

The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation

The unrecognised simplicities of effective action number 2 - ‘Systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’

More context can decrease the signal to noise ratio of communication for people who already have that context

Legibility forces you to fall back on conventional framings which causes you to think about the thing in a conventional way

When you communicate you should strive to demystify the world

It is hard to interface different simulations

Interfacing between closer neighbors on the tech tree is easier than between nodes that are farther apart

Making things more mystifying is way to hold on to power

Explicit rules are a substitution for learned pattern matching

Externalized research is a buffer against B players

# Creating legible interfaces is expensive
[[Structuring knowledge is expensive]].  Interface is an entire art in and of itself so this will not do it justice. Ironically this note is not a good interface to interface design. A legible interface minimizes the amount of context you need to know about whatever is behind the interface and also minimizes the amount of context you need aside from the interface to make it work. It is a lot of work to figure out just the right number of gauges and toggles (observation and controls) to allow someone to get all the utility out of the behind-the-interface system without just exposing the whole system. [[The Map is not the Territory]].  You could think of the expense of context separation via an interface as a [[Transaction costs]]. [[The less shared context you have the higher the coordination costs]]. 

As a consequence, the interface needs to be used enough that the expense is worth it. Therefore, heavily used things tend to have better interfaces, which make them easier to use and creates a positive feedback loop.

This also holds true for interfacing with other people. [[It takes bravery to demystify things]].

There is a tradeoff between communication and the necessity for interface legibility. The more communication between groups working on different pieces, the less legible the interfaces need to be. More communication means more shared context. [[Context is important and underrated for knowledge transfer]].

### Related
- [[Fully open online discussions are low quality because of trust and context]]
- [[Jargon is mystifying to people without the relevant context]]



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Understanding a thing has to do with intuiting the affordances of a thing

Making a thing legible puts it at risk of social destruction

Staying at the top of the ladder of abstraction is mystifying

Constraints and assumptions are not directly observable in literature

Creating tight problem definitions is valuable

# Demystification involves a lot of context
You could think of demystification as the process of decompressing jargon ([[Jargon is mystifying to people without the relevant context]]) and deabstracting abstract ideas. In order to do this, you need to stick much more context back on a thing.

Usually you do this by going up and down the [[The ladder of abstraction]].



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Life Style Guide

And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared

The Heilmeier Catechism

Naming things is Powerful

People like to create shibboleths to distinguish their tribe

Theory needs to be able to take you from an intuitive thing down to theory and then back upward to reconcile with another intuitive thing

Explaining things like I’m five helps avoid the Einstellung Effect

Technical language should be treated like an actual other language

DARPA funds wacky things that go nowhere

Multidisciplinary teams need to leverage different paradigmatic lenses

Luke Email 27 Sep 2020

Concrete PM Tactics

L case study on roadmapping

PARPA deck

# Explain it like I’m Five
Explaining something like someone is five entails unpacking specialized terms and jargon.

Specialized terms and jargon are a way of compressing information - it encodes an idea along with assumptions. [[Jargon is a mechanism for compressing information]]. This compression is useful when you need to communicate the whole thing quickly. 

There are two problems with specialized terms/jargon:
1. It requires the person you’re communicating with to have acquired the prior knowledge to know all the bundled assumptions. Otherwise [[Jargon is mystifying to people without the relevant context]].
2. Those bundled assumptions become ‘frozen’  - if they no longer hold or you could solve a problem by changing one, you literally don’t think of it when using the specialized term.

Explaining something to a five year old requires you to unpack all the context because five year olds clearly have none of it. You can think of explaining to a five year old as decompression. 

The fact that jargon freezes knowledge suggests that explaining something to a five year old is useful for finding secrets in the world. When you break a problem statement open to look at each of its parts, you might realize an assumption that can be shifted.  [[Explaining things like I’m five helps avoid the Einstellung Effect]]. See ([[And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared]])

#### Lots of smart people endorse explaining it like I’m five
[[Earnest Rutherford]]: “it should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.”  - from  Page 418 of *Einstein: His Life and Times* (1972) 

[[David Hilbert]]: “A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.” (*Mathematical Problems* given in 1900 before the International Congress of Mathematicians:)

[[Albert Einstein]] said “that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description ‘that even a child could understand them.’ “ (He did not say the thing about a six year old)

“[[Richard Feynman]], the late Nobel Laureate in physics, was once asked by a Caltech faculty member to explain why spin one-half particles obey Fermi Dirac statistics. Rising to the challenge, he said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he told the faculty member, “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.” - From David Goodstein’s [[Feynman’s Lost Lecture]]

[[Richard Feynman explains fire]]



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Creating legible interfaces is expensive

Focused play enables serendipity

Most online communities feel impotent

The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions

Can you use transparency to earn enough trust to be opaque?

Any conversation can be a conference

The fact that the torah is always in Hebrew is powerful

# Fully open online discussions are low quality because of trust and context
Open annotation projects and open discussions tend to be low quality. Why is this? Open discussions either feel like people taking turns monologuing or getting into irrelevant rabbit holes. These two failure modes happen because there is so little shared context. Most people don’t have the time or inclination to build the relevant context or help newcomers build their context. 

Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser extent) manages to minimize the need for context because they atomize discussions. Tweets are often self-contained and Tweet linking is is structured in a way that makes following the context chain relatively easy. There are also social norms - subtweeting is considered gauche. 

Note that these two failure modes also happen in real life for the same reasons. The chances of it happening online seem harder because its more asynchronous and you can’t read the nonverbal cues in the room. There is some possibility that offline discussions are just as bad as online ones but we don’t notice because it’s just nice to be around other humans. 

### What are some things that might account for offline discussions better that are not just artifacts of being around other humans?

- Often people are related somehow - either all invited by the same person or at least friends of friends
- The place itself suggests context. A talk to a small group of people in someone’s living room is different than a mixer in a VC office is different than a meetup at a bar. Walls of text don’t give much context whether they’re on Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, or IRC. Actually, IRC might provide a little context - “you’re all hardcore nerds.” 
- Offline groups tend to be convened around tighter topics than online groups. Online groups are something like “people who like science!” While an offline meetup would be “Discussion of this particular aspect of marketing.” 
- You can actively see how much people engage with what you’re saying and how they’re reacting to all the other people, all separate from the words being said. Non-verbal observation enables you to build context. 
- You know that everybody is engaged, which encourages you to really think about what you’re going to say. Offline, if someone isn’t engaged it’s obvious that they’re looking at their phone or staring off. Online, the *default* is non-engagement: chats are mostly asynchronous and even if you’re fucking video chatting 50% of people are checking twitter . 
- Groups of people can seamlessly break apart and come together - conversations have more delineated start and stop points

### How could an online discussion become high-quality?

- Introduce each person to each other person directly so they understand what they have in common and why they should care 
- Enforce high-quality profiles that pop up whenever someone mouses over
- Have synchronous times, when everybody knows they should come together
- Have a context setting document for a synchronous time. Think amazon meeting memos. 
- Keep discussions under Dunbars number 
- Have a way to track shared interactions across the internet 
- Somehow replicate the break apart and come together mechanics of conversations - some platforms have tried to do this
- Cultural norms
	- Whenever you post a link, you need to provide context - instead of “<Link> Thoughts?” , “<Link> I think this is interesting but I don’t have enough expertise to judge whether it will be impactful in the near term.  Could someone with more experience in this area weigh in on whether this is legit?” 
	- “Yes, and” >> disagreement
	- Really think hard about whether you’re contributing signal or noise (this is of course hard because at the same time you don’t want to stifle legit discussion) 
	- Call out riffs 
		- “This might be out of left field but it made me think of…”
	- Couple assertions with evidence
	- Couple thoughts with where you’re coming from
	- Never assign thoughts to other people

### Examples
- Washington Post reporter who was also an advocate around sexual assault tweeting about Kobe Bryant right after his death



### Related
- [[Context is important and underrated for knowledge transfer]]
- [[The less shared context you have the higher the coordination costs]]
- [[More context can decrease the signal to noise ratio of communication for people who already have that context]]
- [[Online conferences have different affordances than in person conferences]]
- [[Online communities could enable designed serendipity]]
- [[An online community that works -scene]]
- [[The Polymath Project: Lessons from a Successful Online Collaboration in Mathematics]]
- [[Most online communities feel impotent]]



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Explain it like I’m Five

Demystification involves a lot of context

‘I published a paper on that’

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Book

# Jargon is mystifying to people without the relevant context
When you name something, you create jargon. [[Naming things is Powerful]] and the resulting jargon can enable you to communicate more efficiently with anybody who has relevant context - yourself or others. 

Jargon can act as a Shibboleth and[[People like to create shibboleths to distinguish their tribe]].  This is actually another way that [[Naming things is Powerful]]. It is powerful to have a mystical tribe.

[[The Heilmeier Catechism]] explicitly calls out Jargon because it is designed to be applied by someone outside the applicant’s discipline and therefore probably has little context. 

The upshot here is: jargon is a tool. It can be used for good or bad. 



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neumannOneProcess2020

# Learning a new thing you want to both learn the jargon and explain it like you are five
To actually understand the thing you need to be able to put into simple words 

But to convince people who understand the thing that you understand the thing you need to learn the jargon as well 

Create the context in your head but then also learn how to convey that you have internalized the context

Take a sip of the coolaid, know what it tastes like and be able to describe it but don’t take a giant gulp.

Inspired by reading [[Science Business - Book]]



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Most roadmaps suck

What are the properties of maps?

Maps help you understand the state of something

Maps are multi-scale

Roadmaps need to be coupled to people

# Maps help you figure out possibilities
Even the medieval T-O map let you know that you could get to Africa from Europe by crossing the mediterranean.  Star maps help you figure out which constellations you could draw or where you could look in the night sky. 

If you can’t figure out possible (and unallowable moves) from a map, it’s not doing its job. Many ‘competitive’ landscapes fail on this front. 

A good map makes you aware of the tradeoffs between different possible moves.  Google Maps also helps you figure out possibilities by showing alternate possibilities and making you aware of the time and distance between those possibilities. The parameters of these tradeoffs vary drastically between maps - on a hiking map, elevation is important while on a driving map it is almost irrelevant. On a research map, cost is important while on a star map the concept of cost doesn’t even make sense. 

[[The Map is not the Territory]] - a good map will capture the information that you need to make decisions and exclude information that is distracted. 

*Roadmaps* ([[§Program Design]]) explicitly point out those possibilities in an opinionated way.  The difference between a map and a roadmap is the difference between google maps and the directions the map gives you to a location. 

![](../BearImages/57FE1074-F3ED-4A30-A4EB-C75575380032-456-00003424E76F85DB/9F042C35-37C6-4A14-8DCC-2066389EFB4E.png)
(Wardley)
![](../BearImages/D46F1E2D-1AC7-43B6-B703-46E7BA120E26-456-0000343CA6138B63/A9DE43E5-B06E-442A-8C30-4ED7643D2317.png)

### Related
- [[The less shared context you have the higher the coordination costs]]
- [[Context is important and underrated for knowledge transfer]]
- [[Maps are multi-scale]]
- [[Maps help you understand the state of something]]
- Wardley points out how useless a strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats analysis would be for a battle [On being lost - wardleymaps - Medium](https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec)
	- [[Wardley Maps]]

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When is externalized research better than internalized research and vice versa?

The distinction between areas, programs, and projects

Heilmeier — Licklider — Braben — Elon quadrants of Research Management

What are the goals of the program design process?

PARPA H1 2022 Update Outline

How to think about the differences between FROs and private ARPA programs

Katarzyna Kate Adamala conversation 5 Oct 2021

Detailed outline for nanomodular electronics program

3 Sep 2021

8 Sep 2021

Week of 6 Sep 2021

6 Sep 2021

# Program design is a coordination tool
From [[weaverUnderstandingProgramsProjects2010]]: **Programs** *focus on the coordination of a number of related projects and other activities, over time, to deliver benefits to the organization*. (Contra projects)

Unlike something like architecting a building, the point of doing[[§Program Design]][^1] is not to create a blueprint that encodes all the information of the process and can be handed off to someone to execute on. In this sense, it’s a misnomer to call it “program design” and to call the resulting artifact a “roadmap.” Both of these terms imply a process whose main goal is to produce something static that can be separated from the people involved. In reality the goal is to create a shared purpose (in the [[dancoWelcomeDancoland2021]]/[[Complex System]] sense)[^2] and then maintain that shared purpose. 

Program design coordinates people in three distinct ways: 
1. The process creates is a Schelling point for ongoing *purpose maintenance*. [[Program design creates Schelling points for purpose maintenance]]
2.  The design process’ output isn’t just the artifact but is also connectivity between people, a shared understanding about who has what role, and a shared context between the people who are going to participate in the program. [[The most important role of program design is to build a shared context and connectivity between stakeholders]]
3. The process of *doing* program design itself is a coordination mechanism both between levels of a hierarchy and within levels of that hierarchy. [[The process of program design itself surfaces information through iterative feedback loops]]

### Upshots
There are several takeaways from treating program design seriously as a coordination mechanism. 
- [[Roadmaps need to be coupled to people]] except in situations where there are well-defined interfaces, most progress will be incremental, entities are fairly fungible, and there’s strong incentive for new entities to take on different pieces of the roadmap (like in the semiconductor industry [[International Roadmap for Devices and Systems]].
- [[Speeding up program design requires sales or power]].  
- [[Good program design can’t exist in isolation]]

### Pushbacks
[[Andy Matuschak]] points out that this description of program design clashes with the story of  [[JCR Licklider]]. Instead of an iterated process of understanding the state of a field and finding a target point that aligns the various stakeholders <[[Stakeholders are sometimes the maximum level of precision for complex systems]]>, Lick (the story goes) had a vision and did a combination of funding the few people who shared it and forced other people to go along with it by threatening their other funding. 

It’s the difference between 
1. Going around a boat and finding a mutually acceptable way for everybody to row and 
2. Only letting the people who will to row the way you want to row on the boat in the first place. 

There are several corollary questions here:
- Is the program manager’s role primarily *selection* and then acting as a communication facilitator OR is it primarily *alignment* and then acting as a shepherd and communicator to maintain that alignment? Another framing might be “getting the right people in the room” vs “getting the relevant people in the room and then making them work together.” 
	- 
- Is there a spectrum between those two roles? It feels that way. [[Programs and Program Managers exist on several different spectra]]
- Does the state of the world and a program manager’s power affect how program management needs to happen? Lick was hooked into some of the only sources of funding and had a lot of money, which allowed him to both enable people to spin up entire labs from scratch and put pressure on existing labs. 
	- How hard would it be to spin up a lab that wouldn’t exist otherwise in a university? 
	- Is there a way to “spin up a lab” outside of the university?
	- Does this only work with low enough equipment costs that you don’t need to have accumulated equipment over years?
	- There’s something about the gap between what people say they’re doing and what they’re actually doing that makes this whole thing very sticky.
		- There are many more people doing research <[[Research can mean drastically different things]]> on many different areas so finding people who aren’t at least adjacent to a thing is harder. Which means that no matter what you want to do you’re probably going to be at least nominally adjacent to what someone  else is working on. <[[“There’s a startup for that” is a harmful dogma]]> 
	- Does this suggest that the sorts of programs PARPA can undertake is also constrained by how many people are working adjacent to the area?
- Does the roadmap-as-coordination only work for incremental things that already have momentum like Semiconductors? 
- Have there been successful programs where the program manager didn’t come in with a strong vision from day one? 
	- If it is the case that every successful program needs a Lick-style PM, where did the person create the vision from in the first place? 
		- The assumption would be that it was primarily brewed in their own head from experiences? Is there more value to visions that come from experiences vs. conversations that are specifically for the purpose?
		- [[Can you only come at powerful visions sideways?]]
	- [[DARPA’s Process for Creating New Programs]] suggests that the answer is yes. 

### References
- [[Stephen Dean podcast 20 Aug 2021]]
- The [[The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors]] is widely acclaimed as one of the most successful roadmaps *because* it enables this coordination. 

### Related
- [[DARPA is a coordination mechanism]]
- [[Plans are coordination mechanisms]]
- [[PARPA is a coordination mechanism]]
- [[Coordination Problems]]
- [[Centralized coordination makes sure effort is not being repeated in stupid ways]]
- [[The less shared context you have the higher the coordination costs]]
- [[Centralized coordination sometimes stops effort from being repeated in smart ways]]
- One thing that does need to be decided up front is what organizational form the program will take. 2021 culture is heavily biased towards programs being structured as high-growth startups so answering the question [[When should an idea that smells like research be a startup?]] is important.
- [[The distinction between areas, programs, and projects]]
- [[Programs and Program Managers exist on several different spectra]]

[^1]: Note that as of at least [[3 Sep 2021]] I’m still feeling around what program design actually *is* but you can still make assertions about a [[Nebulous]] thing.
[^2]: At least as of [[8 Sep 2021]] I find this to be a really powerful concept to think about the equivalent for a “goal” in complex systems to sidestep the pressure to either think about goals or simply the things that a productive system *does* like conversations and decisions.

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Program design is a coordination tool

Fully open online discussions are low quality because of trust and context

Maps help you figure out possibilities

Research tends to work best when it can be done by small teams

Joel Chan Podcast Feb 2 2020

Shared context is a core variable for human relationships

# The less shared context you have the higher the coordination costs
This is why [[Learning a new thing you want to both learn the jargon and explain it like you are five]] - the jargon reduces the coordination costs. 

[[Explain it like I’m Five]] is a way to make context more explicit

### Related
- [[More context can decrease the signal to noise ratio of communication for people who already have that context]]
- [[Conversations are better at demystifying than written material]]
- [[Jargon is mystifying to people without the relevant context]]
- [[Demystification involves a lot of context]]



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Benʼs working notes

The less shared context you have the higher the coordination costs

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